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Reasoning in the sense of rationality is a consistency tool, and nothing more. Its job is to tell us that if we hold a and b, and if we also believe that logical contradiction necessarily implies falsehood, then we must hold c as a consequence. It is an intermediate processor, albeit a very valuable one. It cannot ground itself, at the ‘bottom’ end, or give meaning to its outcome at the ‘top’ end. At the bottom end it must rely on axioms assumed on the basis that they are intuitively true (the word ‘axiom’ comes from the Greek word axia, meaning ‘value’ – in other words, reason is founded on
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to suppose that an hypothesis is real because it is consistent …
Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases – which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things.
Conceptualising anything is a way of asking ‘what it can do for us’,
Scientific thought [by which he meant not imaginative scientific work, but rational, linear thinking] is … essentially power-thought – the sort of thought, that is to say, whose purpose, conscious or unconscious, is to give power to its possessor. Now power is a causal concept, and to obtain power over any given material one need only understand the causal laws to which it is subject. This is an essentially abstract matter, and the more irrelevant details we can omit from our purview, the more powerful our thoughts will become.10
Abstraction’, according to John Kay, ‘is the process of turning complex problems we cannot completely describe into simpler ones that we think we can solve. But gauging which simplification is appropriate requires judgment and experience. Our simplifications are idiosyncratic and subjective.’
‘It is the mark of an educated man’, wrote Aristotle, ‘to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits’.46
To love certainty overmuch is often to be content with too easy solutions, and definiteness may be achieved only at the price of inadequacy … For, after all, neither literature nor life is quite sane and orderly, and the whole truth, perhaps the most vital part of the truth, is not to be looked for in a clear and well-regulated survey. A thing may be perfect only because it is incomplete …60
Bringing an unwarranted simplicity to the matter strips away layers of depth, rather than enhancing insight.
Quantity always changes quality. This is so obvious that I am sorry to have to state it, but
Your ultimate goal might be happiness; and there are worse goals to have. The trouble is that, with all due respect to the US constitution, happiness can’t be pursued.
Almost all philosophical arguments are invented … to recommend, or defend from attack, conclusions which the philosopher was from the outset bent upon believing … To mistake [philosophical reasonings] for the causes which lead to a belief in the conclusion, is generally to fall into a naïve error.
Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle – they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
Many languages have distinct words for knowing, dependent on the sense in which one can be said to know. In Latin sapere is distinguished from cognoscere, in French savoir from connaître, in German wissen from kennen. In each case the first indicates propositional knowledge, ‘knowing that’ such and such is the case, which requires no experience; while the second indicates knowledge of someone, some place, or other unique aspect of the world, directly from experience. Ultimately, in fact, all knowledge derives from experience, for which there are no propositions – thus sapere bows to
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Conceptual metaphor is what makes most abstract thought possible.
Abstract thought is relational
All knowledge, as Bateson once said, is knowledge of difference – except that it is knowledge of difference within sameness, and sameness within difference: it is only when we see both the sameness and the difference that we can say we know something.
Niels Bohr: ‘it is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth.’
was the distinction between the two sorts of truths, profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd.
Continuity, like extension in space or time, cannot be put together, only taken apart.
A friend was visiting in the home of Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr, the famous atom scientist. As they were talking, the friend kept glancing at a horseshoe hanging over the door. Finally, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, he demanded: ‘Niels, it can’t possibly be that you, a brilliant scientist, believe that foolish horseshoe superstition?!’ ‘Of course not’, replied the scientist. ‘But I understand it’s lucky whether you believe in it or not.’
Most of our knowing is ‘knowing without knowing why’, as psychologist Guy Claxton felicitously puts it.
In Also Sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote: ‘The body is a great sage, a Many with One purpose, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd … There is more sense in thy body than in thy best wisdom.’135
‘isolated reasoning is impossible, because reasoning depends on a prior setting-up of a system of concepts, percepts, classes, categories – call them what you will – in terms of which all situations are understood. It is there that biases and selection enter the picture.’
in his magnum opus Truth and Method, the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer urged that prejudice-free knowledge is neither possible nor desirable. Gadamer argues that prejudices are not necessarily vicious, and that the Enlightenment had a ‘prejudice against prejudice’.12 Prejudices cannot be done away with: they are replaced only with other prejudices, sometimes better, sometimes worse,
much as tradition serves as the condition of one’s knowledge, the background that instigates all inquiry, one can never start from a tradition-free place. A tradition is what gives one a question or interest to begin with.13
reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions … reasoning pushes people not towards the best decisions but towards decisions that are easier to justify.67
By intuition is meant the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known, that is, to elements common both to it and other objects. To analyse, therefore, is to express a thing as a function of something other than itself. All analysis is thus a translation, a development into symbols, a representation taken from successive points of view from which we note as many resemblances as possible
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Indeed, it is claimed by some psychologists and philosophers of choice theory that the association between heuristics and intuition is ‘unwarranted’.
‘There is no such thing in practice as a desire without a belief or a belief without a desire’, writes
It is a worrying reality that we could lose our intuitive sense of what is reasonable altogether if it gets no reinforcement from day-to-day experience.
The quest for numerical metrics of accountability is particularly attractive in cultures marked by low social trust.’
Whitehead’s insight: ‘civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.’
It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.
In order to describe such things more adequately one needs, perhaps, a language in which the boundary between ‘I’ and ‘it’ is fluid – of notions, anyhow of terms, that are less definite and held, as it were, in solution.65
For truth requires imagination. It alone can put us in touch with aspects of reality to which our habits of thought have rendered us blind. It leads not to an escape from reality, but a sudden seeing into its depths,
Fancy is passive; it sees objects, which are fixed, definite, known and ‘dead’. Imagination, by contrast, is active, vital, and is already part of what it sees (there is no subject-object divide here). Fancy puts together things already known in a novel way; imagination recreates the known and familiar as something unique and new, by a process of inhabiting, or permeating from the inside – not by combination or addition from the outside. Fancy is subject to conscious choice.
I quoted earlier the logician Waismann’s saying ‘for my part, I’ve always suspected that clarity is the last refuge of those who have nothing to say’.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s view that ‘the straight line leads to the downfall of mankind’.
The name hormesis has been given to the phenomenon whereby a substance or process that is damaging to an organism above a certain level may have an opposite effect at lower levels.
William James points out, that ‘most human institutions, by the purely technical and professional manner in which they come to be administered, end by becoming obstacles to the very purposes which their founders had in view.’
Somehow life does, out of its total resources, find ways of satisfying opposites at once. This is precisely the paradoxical aspect which much of our civilization presents … the way to certainty lies through radical doubt; virtue signifies not innocence but the knowledge of sin and its overcoming; by obeying nature, we command her, etc. The ethical and the religious life are full of such contradictions held in solution. You hate your enemy?—well, forgive him, and thereby heap coals of fire on his head; to realize yourself, renounce yourself; to save your soul, first lose it; in short, die to
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